That’s right baby, I’m moving this party to my own little domain and you’re invited! As special incentive I am offering you a fabulous celebratory post by my very first ever guest blogger which you won’t want to miss.

Dear Stephen Hawking, I need your help. See, you can’t type or talk but you’ve got that cool little machine thingie that somehow reads the brainwaves from your pinkie finger and types out super complicated theories about blackholes and the basic nature of the universe and probably also grocery lists and whatnot. We won’t even talk about top down cosmology here because that’s probably not the type of thing most of my readers are interested in, or at least, they don’t KNOW that they’re interested in it (of course they are, but it would be easier for them to identify with it if it were named something less pretentious and you might want to consider that the next time you’re naming fancy theories, that’s all I’m saying Stephen Hawking.) but let’s just say that you have come up with some unbelievably complicated crap since you lost the ability to speak or feed yourself. Plus, you were on Star Trek The Next Generation that one time so no matter what I will always love you like Whitney Houston loves Kevin Costner.

OK So but here’s my problem Stephen Hawking: I have this crapped out thumb/wrist situation which is seriously impacting a previously mildly disturbed elbow situation and turning my whole right arm and shoulder into a thoroughly buggered DEAR SWEET JESUS TYPING, TEXTING OR WRITING MAKES ME A MURDEROUS STABBY BITCH type of situation. It also make sitting motionless at my desk without crying, picking up my toddler without falling down or OPENING A BOTTLE OF WINE incredibly difficult, but I understand that you can’t fix everything Stephen Hawking and therefore all I’m trying to talk to you about today is the fact that I want to borrow your voice synthesizer except that I need it to work the other way around, get me?

Great.

I can talk. There’s nothing wrong with my pipes Stephen Hawking, just ask my husband. And I don’t have any big fancy theories that I need to communicate to the world, I just need to be able to talk to people on the interwebs and on the phone without being driven to chop my hand off using a pair of baby nail clippers.

Since you didn’t answer my first (private) letter or simply mail me a fancy voice synthesizer machine I went ahead and saw an Orthopaedic Surgeon today. His name is Jeffrey and while he didn’t offer me any kind of voice synthesizer substitute, he did give me a nice juicy shot of cortisone into my wrist so frankly he’s the current front runner for my favorite Doctor Guy in the universe, even if YOU DO understand that universe better than he does.

Stephen Hawking, I’d like very much to put you back in front of the line of super smart guys who understand important crap so that I don’t have to, but frankly if you don’t pony up soon with the synthesizer I’ll be forced to bump you back behind Perez Hilton, because at least he’s making an effort to explain the whole Miley Cyrus thing to me. So come on Stephen Hawking, let’s go. Bring me some solutions not problems.

But I swear on Worf’s Bat’leth, if you mention Vlingo Stephen Hawking, you are dead to me.

I’m a very organized person. You know, the kind of organized person that other people make Monica from Friends jokes about? Most of the time. I handed out timelines to wedding party members, vendors, hell even GRANDPARENTS at our rehearsal dinner so that everyone would know exactly where they were supposed to be and when they were supposed to be there. I plan vacation activities down to the day. I can tell you what we’re having for dinner every night this week as well as what days Topher is taking leftovers for lunch vs which days he gets to choose between a can Chef Boyardee from last year’s hurricane stash and a PB&J.

And yet today, I am all in a tizzy and feel as though I can’t find my sunglasses, car keys or underpants. Ok, well I can’t find my sunglasses, the car keys and underpants have been located.

I feel scattered and disconnected. I have no idea what I’m doing or what needs to be done, where I’m going or when I’m supposed to be there. Whether I am on track to accomplish very big and important things or if I will instead being wearing the same pair of jeans all week because I’m so distracted that I can’t remember to wash any clothing.

I’m a big list maker but at the moment I feel that I have too many lists going on. Perhaps the problem is that some of them are wholly in my head and some are partially written down and partially in my head. Also, there is no Master List.

And that’s where my real problem is. At this moment in my life I have more plates spinning than I can ever remember having. Blogging, sewing, baby-raising, marriage maintaining, job doing, life altering plan making… there are so many things going on right now and none of them are small. All demand attention in significant quantities. I can have all of the grocery/chore/blog post/BlogHer ’10 Sessions to check out/ territory review/ required trainings/ hot dog day/ vacation packing/ date night planning/garden seed buying lists in the world, but if I don’t have some kind of Master plan that tells me what tasks I need to be doing right now to make all of these big things come to fruition at the right time for my family and my work. I’m drowning.

So once again I come to my friendly neighborhood interweb friends for help. What do you guys do to keep it all together? How do you keep building the big picture stuff according to spec, while dealing with the day to day minutia?

Back in the days of MySpace I got tracked down by an ex boyfriend. It had been at least 7 years since we broke up, and before we’d started dating in our senior year of high school we’d been friends for several years. So when I got the myspace message from him I wasn’t displeased. It turned out he was married and local to our area. I didn’t have many friends here and was excited to get together with something of a known quantity. We met him and his wife for drinks, and then later a dinner. She was awesome, and we got along really well. He hadn’t changed much since high school, still making borderline inappropriate comments and jokes which I found annoying but harmlessly so. In fact that was the word I used to describe him in my head. Harmless.

We lost touch a year or so later, their lifestyle and ours were quite different what with the consistent partying on their end and the hermit like tendencies on ours. By the time I surfaced on the internet again I had a three month old, and and his wife’s FaceBook profile listed her as single and living in another state. Obviously I had missed something.

I asked, but he dodged the question and suggested meeting to discuss. I mentioned coffee and he mentioned cocktails. I mentioned getting a babysitter so we could meet up one evening and he mentioned meeting up without Topher. Then he mentioned cocktails again. I mentioned being busy. That was a while ago.

A few weeks ago Topher and I were watching that episode of Parenthood where the hunky stay at home dad confesses to his uptight workaholic lawyer wife that the super hot stay at home mom bossy playgroup yoga chick made a pass at him. Lawyer mom is livid, and demands they cut all ties. Stay at home dad sighs, their 5 year old daughters are best friends, but he agrees. Later in the show lawyer mom sees the little girls snuggling together while watching a puppet show. She relents so that her 5 year old won’t lose her best friend.

Bad call, lawyer mom. Bad. Frickin. Call.

I would like to state at this point in an effort to avoid any misunderstandings/hate mail that in advocating that couples protect their marriages I am in no way advocating remaining in or tolerating a relationship that is abusive in any way. Get the hell out of that kind of mess immediately.

A few weeks ago I got a text from the ex who was so keen about having husband-less cocktails, asking if this was still my number. I ignored it. Then I got a phone call but no voicemail. Then I got a FaceBook message talking about drinks again and telling me he’d moved, to which I responded with my good wishes and not much else. Later in the week I got another text inviting me to a party at his new place which I also ignored.

The night of the party I got yet another text, asking where I was, calling me “baby”.

There was some back and forth after that wherein he professed his disbelief that I no longer had any interest in being “friends”. I could practically feel him trying to work his way back to “harmless” through the phone. But the truth is that he isn’t, no matter how much of an idiot I think he is, no matter how little of a “chance” he may ever dream of having.

I don’t need friends who threaten my marriage. My daughter does not need me to have friends who threaten the marriage which is the framework of the family life we are building for her every day. It is my job to protect that framework, to protect not only MY marriage but HER FAMILY.

I’m not saying that I think I can guarantee a happy and successful marriage by eliminating my ex boyfriends as FaceBook friends (pretty sure he was the only one, but whatever) or that I have all the answers for how to never get divorced. I know that I do not.

What I’m saying is that marriage is work, but it’s not just working ON the marriage in my opinion. I think we also need to take stock of what’s happening around the marriage and the contributions being made to it by people who aren’t in it. Because the people you surround your family with have influence on your relationships. It’s that simple. If what’s happening around my marriage isn’t going to help it thrive, isn’t going to help make this family strong for myself, my spouse and my children, then I need to seriously consider if that thing really needs to be a part of our lives or if it needs to be eliminated.

At the end of the day the accountability for the relationship between two married people rests on their shoulders and no one else’s. But that accountability isn’t just about reacting to situations that come up, it’s about the relationship as a whole and how it’s developed, cared for, protected and regarded by the partners who build it every day. And I can tell you that to protect my marriage I’d go a hell of a lot further than a text message, or disrupting the social life of a 5 year old.

So I had stuff planned to blog about today, but then yesterday I saw an ad in the target circular for dysons on clearance at target, so I went on my laptop to ask the budget spreadsheet fairies if I could have one and they said of course not and to please stop balancing the laptop precariously on the arm of the sofa because it was freaking them out and I said shut up it’s fine, you guys are such alarmists and also screw you guys I’m getting a dyson and they said fine go ahead you idiot and then this happened:

So then I had to trade my imaginary money into real money and not get a dyson and instead got this:

And no I am not referring to the shoe although it was also expensive and I never would have bought it but it was for a wedding I was in a few years ago and has therefore become one of those shoes that I don’t like and never wear but can’t bring myself to get rid of because I spent so much damn money on it.

I was talking about my new netbook. The shoe is just there for scale, people.

Anyway, all of that is to tell you that I am currently blogging at you from my blackberry so if you could forgive the typos that would be awesome because sometimes the berry makes certain “choices” for me when I’m not looking that I find out about later and they usually cause a fight and also that I will be back shortly once I get my junk together and also that I am an idiot and also that when your budget spreadsheet fairies tell you there’s a man in the closet with a knife or whatnot don’t stand around asking questions just get on up out of there because those bitches know what they’re about.